


King of Cups

by jouissant



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Canon Era, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7697959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not everyone believed in magic, but Gene had seen enough he didn't have a choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	King of Cups

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellabaloo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellabaloo/gifts).



> Thanks for requesting these two! I had a great time writing this and I hope you enjoy it.

In the medical tent outside Carentan, Gene saw Lieutenant Winters give a blind man back his sight. One minute he'd been kneeling before Blithe, talking to him in that soft way he had. Gene was standing to one side, hovering if he was honest, and trying not to let on he was doing it. He was thinking about Winters, about how he was good at talking to the men, had a way of soothing them Gene appreciated, and that it was a real shame about Blithe, who had seemed jumpy from the get-go, and wasn't it always the frightened ones who got it worst? Winters had gotten back up and turned to leave, looking regretful, and as he had Blithe had called out to him, called him back and held pale spidery fingers out in front of his face and Winters' as if Winters had been the one blinded, or as if he didn't know what a hand looked like. 

Winters looked at Blithe, then cast around him like he needed someone to bounce the moment off of, the way you might call out in a cavern to try and find the end. His eyes found Gene, and he didn't quite look dumbfounded but he did look surprised. Gene shrugged. Winters gave a little shake of his head, nodded at Gene and doubletimed it out of the tent best he could on his bad ankle. It all happened so quick Gene just shrugged and considered maybe nothing had happened after all. 

It was the kind of thing you wouldn't believe unless you saw it with your own eyes. Which Gene had, and not for the first time. But not everybody grew up like Gene; not everyone saw the things he'd seen. Not everyone believed in magic, but Gene had seen enough magic he didn't have a choice. 

Blithe sat awhile longer, stunned like bird who'd flung itself into a windowpane. Gene turned away for a minute to see to his pot of coffee, and when he looked back next Blithe was gone. 

Later he thought of telling the boys what he'd seen, but then he thought about the look on Winters' face afterwards, and he thought about the looks his grandma got in church sometimes. And that wouldn't do, thought Gene. That wouldn't do at all.

Gene wouldn't have said he _watched_ Winters after the incident with Blithe—nothing so deliberate as that. He thought about it, but only so much as he thought about anything in France, which was to say not very much at all. War was war, and Gene didn't have much time for idle contemplation. They'd jumped on Holland by the time he had occasion to consider the matter again, and by then Blithe was long gone, flopped into the underbrush with a red hole in his neck, and Gene had as good as forgotten him. 

Tonight they were bivouacked in a rolling field, the sort of wide open place Gene distrusted just on instinct. He'd lined up for chow with Heffron and the others, but having eaten he found he wanted to be alone. He drifted thus into a little hollow in the earth where he could spread out a tarp and turn his collar up against the September nip in the air. Back home the mercury wouldn't yet have dipped below ninety; Gene would go about in an undershirt and skivvies inside and open all the doors and windows and dunk in a lukewarm tub and drip sweat anyway. The fly-strips would swing amber in the thick light, burdened with their quarry, and in the night cockroaches would creep out and perch on the walls like scarabs. But now he was in Holland, and it was chilly, and the light was going. 

Presently Nixon and Winters ambled over, Winters' head bowed, hair coppery in a thinning wedge of sun. Nixon still wore his helmet, which bore a new and ugly-looking dent. He moved with a rummy lurch, as though walking the deck of a ship. Winters tossed his gear onto the ground and flopped down next to it with an informality Gene hadn't ever been party to. He said something to Nixon, who made a face, gestured around him like the field made him nervy as it did Gene. But he settled down next to Winters soon enough, and opened a can of something he didn't seem overly excited about. They either didn't notice Gene or didn't care to, but that was all right by him. He wasn't looking to be noticed. 

"How's your head?" Winters asked Nixon. 

"Never been better." 

"That cut stop bleeding yet?" 

"It was barely bleeding to start with," said Nixon, sounding unmannerly. "And it's a graze, not a cut." 

"Pass me your lighter," Winters said. "I want a better look." He reached for Nixon, who ducked away, as wary of fussing as a kid. Winters grabbed him by the sleeve— "C'mon, Lew"—and Nixon yielded, tossing over his lighter with a groan. 

"I wish you'd leave off," Nixon said, but he let Winters kneel beside him anyway and hold the lighter's flame up to his forehead. Winters brushed Nixon's hair back with his free hand and frowned intently at his skin. He said something Gene couldn't hear, and Nixon murmured a reply. Then the lighter's flame flickered out, and all at once the world around them seemed to shudder, to ripple like water with a stone thrown in. For a split second Gene was ready to hit the deck, so sure was he that this was some newfangled mode of German assailment, but just as quickly as the disturbance began it died away, leaving Gene as it had found him, with the edges of his vision in slightly softer focus. He felt a little like he'd been swallowed up by his earlier memory: fall on the bayou, the air heavy, the frogs and cicadas screaming. 

In the space of a blink the feeling was gone, and the last of the sun had dipped below the horizon. Winters and Nixon were talking quietly together as though nothing had happened. A glow came up over the horizon to the east; Eindhoven had begun to burn, and the two of them got up and walked off a little ways to get a better look. 

Gene laid out on his tarp and balled one of his pouches up under his head, both because it made a serviceable pillow and because he liked to keep it close at hand. He shut his eyes, but he lay awake in the twilight a long time, pondering. 

Well, he thought. That was magic if I ever saw it. 

***

The thing about magic was it tended to get all bound up with the rest of a person. That was the way Gene always thought about it, anyway. Growing up he'd come to expect magic more often than not, and more often than not he found it. Magic came curling up through a person's knotholes and floorboards, made the air they walked through crackle and spark. After that September evening Gene came to expect magic from Dick Winters, and as before he wasn't disappointed. But he soon found he couldn't tell the difference between what was supernatural and what wasn't, nor did he especially care to try. And anyway, battle came steeped in its own particular lore, and maybe if you dug down far enough in the rare earth that was what you'd find: just plain old luck, and Winters a lightning rod. 

In the mud and blood after they took the crossroads, Winters didn't look like anything but a man, wrung out and stupefied. He stared, mostly. He stared up at the road where Dukeman fell. He stared at Liebgott's neck. Gene saw him mark the jut of Liebgott's jaw, the rage that throbbed in time with his pulse. 

"You need to sit your ass down," Gene said to Liebgott, who was staring at the crowd of German prisoners like a kid about to take a magnifying glass to an anthill. He glared at Gene as he obeyed, kicking at a clot of mud with his boot heel. Gene got up on his knees and hovered alongside him, daubing at the wound with mercurochrome. 

"Your mama call this monkey's blood? Mine always did." He took hold of Liebgott's chin with thumb and forefinger, partly to get a better look and partly to keep him from glowering at the prisoners, one of whom wouldn't take his eyes off Liebgott's rifle and looked ready to mess his drawers.

Liebgott jerked his chin free. "Yeah, sure. I guess so. Look, you mind hurrying it up, Doc?" 

"You got someplace to be?" 

"I do if Winters asks for volunteers to chaperone that pack of krauts." 

Gene sighed. "If you carry on like I know you want to, you'll either bleed yourself stupid or die of septicemia." 

"Ooh, septicemia. Medical corps teach you that?" 

"They sure did."

"Was that before or after you took out ol' Sobel's appendix?" 

Gene grunted by way of reply. He could glower as good as Liebgott could when he got a mind to. He had a mind to now. He made short work of his bandage, frowning as blood and mercurochrome came through right away. He clapped Liebgott on the back. 

"Good as new," he said. "You come see me back at HQ later, hear? I want to change that tonight." 

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, thanks, Doc." 

"Don't mention it." 

He rocked up onto his feet and turned away, let Liebgott go back to poking the beehive. He squinted into the milky sunlight. The cloud cover had burned off, and the glare made his head hurt. He wanted some coffee. Across the way Winters was still staring up at the berm. Gene thought he looked like he wanted some coffee too. 

***

One night in October Gene delivered Moose Heyliger into the gore-stained hands of a field surgeon with a sour-milk look. His expression got sourer as he bent over the stretcher checking Heyliger over, and Gene balled his hands into fists and tried not to look too steamed. 

"What happened?" 

"He forgot the password," Gene said. "Sentry shot him."

"Christ, what a fuckup. Well, he missed the major vessels or you'd have lost him before he hit the ambulance. Small mercies, huh? I don't see any syrettes," said the surgeon crisply. He flipped up one of Heyliger's slack eyelids. Gene was distracted. Heyliger groaned softly and shifted on the stretcher. He had a mass of bandages tamped to his pelvis, held there with Gene's weak white tape and his own gummy blood. 

"Hey," said the surgeon. 

"Huh?" 

"I said, I don't see any syrettes on his jacket, and he's doped to the gills. How much did he get?" 

Gene swallowed. "I, uh. Don't know exactly," he said. "Two or three." The imprecision pained him. He thought of Welsh and Winters, how squirmy they'd looked. He'd never seen Winters look that way, like he'd fallen in the deep end. The sight made him feel sicker than any wound could, though he couldn't exactly say why. 

"Two or three? Don't know exactly? Jesus, man, what the fuck kinda horror show are you running in the—where are you from again?" 

"The 506th, sir." 

"Airborne," the surgeon said, shaking his head. "Bunch of goddamn madmen if you ask me." 

"Yes, sir," said Gene through his teeth. 

When he left the field hospital he was just as pissed off as he'd been when he arrived, and when he found himself in front of Winters' billet he was inclined to pick up where he left off at the back door of the ambulance. He must have looked it, too, the way Winters' runner ducked out of his way. When Gene came in and stood at attention Winters looked up from his desk as though he fully expected to be shouted at. 

"At ease," he said, his expression grim. Then: "Well?"

"He's alive," said Gene tersely. "He oughta make it back over to England, anyway." 

"Thank God," said Winters. He ran a hand over his face. In the poor light he looked grey with worry, and all at once Gene felt his ire dissolve. He had a thought then—it was something about the way Winters had looked before, crouching over Heyliger, the ground slippery with blood. He looked the way Gene thought he himself might look if he'd come upon the scene to find his pouch suddenly empty of supplies. He chewed on his bottom lip, considering. 

Nothing for it, he decided. He'd say his piece; at worst Winters would think him crazy. "Permission to speak freely, sir." 

Winters grimaced. "Go ahead, Eugene." 

"I, uh. I had a cousin," Gene started. "Drowned in a pond when he was eleven. They pulled him out bloated up like a barrel, dead as dead, but my grandma worked over him an hour or two anyway. They had to pull her off, in the end, her kicking and hitting out and swearing she could bring him back." 

"Doc—" 

Gene kept on. "She was what they call a _traiteuse_ ," he said. "You hear of a _traiteuse_ before, Captain Winters?" 

Winters shook his head. 

"She could lay her hands on people," Gene said. "Heal their hurts, or most of them, anyway."

Winters stayed quiet. He laid his hands out before him on the desk, staring down at flesh and bone and tendon the way he'd looked at Blithe's hand in the tent that day, as though it held some answer. Then he looked back up at Gene, his eyes wide and colorless, his face drawn. 

"There was so much blood," he said softly. "I couldn't—fix it." He flexed his fingers against the wood. 

"You can't always," Gene said. "She used to tell me you couldn't always." 

Grandma used to say you can't save a body that can't be saved, used to tell him that from before he learned to speak. It's His will, she used to say, and if His will don't match up with yours all the _traiteurs_ and _traiteuses_ in Louisiana put together couldn't raise that body up again. She told him and told him but still they had to pull her off Little Joe where he lay out alongside that swimming hole, and afterwards she never was quite the same. 

Winters slumped, catching his cheek in one hand and propping his head on his elbow. He looked a little less peaked, as if the secret had kept him staked upright and telling it eased him some. "How did you know?" he asked. 

"I thought about it that day with Blithe," Gene said, and Winters nodded slowly. "Because of my grandma. Then you took that mark off Captain Nixon's forehead." 

Winters colored, and Gene immediately wished he'd kept his mouth shut. There was precious little privacy at war; you counted on men turning away, or pretending to. But Gene remembered so keenly the way the air had felt that night in the field, the way the evening seemed set to quivering, holding its breath in wonder. Gene was a quiet man by nature, but it truth be told it had been a real trial to stay quiet on the subject. Even now the disclosure was a pleasure, tempered though it was by Winters' obvious discomfort. 

Winters swallowed; Gene could see the moment he tamped his habitual calm down on top of whatever it was he'd let Gene see. Gene looked at the floor, shuffled his feet around obligingly. Made it easier the way he'd want someone to do for him. 

"Blithe was the first time," Winters said presently. "Nixon was the second. The guinea pig, you might say."

"I guess it worked," Gene said. 

Winters's mouth twitched, the ghost of a grin. "I guess it did." 

Gene's mouth felt crowded with questions; once again he felt like a child cantering along at Grandma's side, clutching her soft pink hand and spraying her with words as with peppershot. How does it make you feel? When did you know you could do it? Are some ailments more troublesome than others, and how, and why? But he couldn't harass Winters the way he had her, even if he somehow got the impression Winters wouldn't be entirely opposed. He had a bright-eyed look about him now, a thoughtfulness. He opened his mouth as though to ask a question of his own and then shut it.

Gene let the silence stretch for a time before he spoke again. "Well," he said, beginning to feel as though he imposed. "I only came to give you the news about Lieutenant Heyliger." 

"Sure," Winters said, sitting up straighter in his chair. "Thanks, Doc." He clasped his hands before him, and it seemed to Gene that the affinity they'd shared across the desk a moment ago, while not precisely absent now, had dissipated. 

***

This was what happened to magic in Bastogne: 

it got buried like a body under a ton of wet snow; 

it got snapped like an armbone gleaming like pearl in a mess of gore; 

it winnowed to nothing shivering in a bundle of pilfered dead man's rags;

it starved on lemon powder and gravelly spoonfuls of beans; 

it bled out red on white white white; 

it—

"Gene." 

it whispered nights—

"Gene." 

—whispered nights in the gaps between whistling rockets, whistling air that swirled in a windpipe til lungs snapped open wide enough for 

MEDIC

Don't know that word now, sounds a little like magic if you slur it 

"Gene!" 

Somebody had his hands on Gene's shoulder, wrenched him over and mashed his cheek hard in the cold and the wet. Loud noise over his head wheeeee and somewhere back off the line an almighty crash. Get off me, he thought. Get off and let me go back to sleep. Whoever it was was hollering and hollering, wouldn't let up saying something about the captain, and that snagged just so on some jagged edge at the back of Gene's brain and made him sit up and try to clamber out of his hole, clawing every which way, and it wasn't until that somebody wheeled back bleeding and cursing and clutching his hand that Gene realized it was Heffron and felt sorry. But by then it was too late; another rocket screamed over and behind it and under it Winters was yelling, and what had Gene been thinking about in the hole? Something about— 

MEDIC

Okay, okay, thought Gene, and lumbered once more through the snow. 

Months ago Winters had looked sunk next to Heyliger, but from the second Gene gained the lip of the little vale that had housed the officers' ill-considered fire he knew that this was different, that this was Winters with his mind wrapped around something, fingers frozen to it sooner than let it get knocked loose and buried like every other scrap of goodness had out here. In ice and in pine, in a shit-studded foxhole. He was talking to Welsh, voice so soft, and oh, Gene thought, oh the feel of that voice! Welsh screamed and the artillery barrage kept on, muffled now like the gentle crump of sheets blowing out on the clothesline, his grandma's sheets stained pink as grenadine after letting some wailing girl birth a baby on her big brass bed, its body limp and blue until Gene's grandma closed her eyes and spoke soft like Winters spoke to Harry Welsh now. 

Gene helped Harry ride that voice off to sleep and gave him a morphine blanket to cuddle up with, and that had been the right thing, because when it was over Winters knelt next to him in the snow and spoke to him in that same voice, and so instead of going back to sleep in his hole like he wanted Gene hopped a jeep to town and ate something hot and tasteless. 

***

Gene was back in his foxhole, belly full but hungry still. He felt hollowed out, cored like a melon. He felt as though his every cell was grasping for something out beyond the treeline, beyond the Germans whose voices he heard now and again, rising and falling and dying away as the night wore on. His hands hurt. He thought he hated that the most of anything here, the way your hands ached to do any damn thing. The other day he'd fumbled to get that line in Smokey's arm, his veins too flat and Gene's hands too clumsy. Now his split fingertip pained him. He peered at it, put it up close to his face in the shadows. All around him the snow glowed blue beneath a half-assed moon. 

There was a sound then at the mouth of the hole, and before Gene could get himself together to do much more than notice Winters dropped down alongside him. 

"Sir," Gene said. 

"Hi, Doc," said Winters, conversational as you please. At first Gene had the thought he might be soused, but that was impossible. 

"Sir?" 

"You get something to eat?" Winters asked. His face was white, his features rimed with frost. He looked bad, Gene thought; he'd looked bad this whole time, like he whatever he was carrying around inside of him was drawing off Winters' own vigor. 

"Yessir," Gene said. 

"Any good?" He sounded hopeful.

Gene was sorry to disappoint him. He shrugged. "Chow's better here, sir." 

"If you like beans," Winters said.

"Guess I do." 

Winters heaved a glittery sigh. "Be straight with me a minute, would you, Gene?" 

Gene swallowed. "All right," he said, though anyone could tell you what a fool promise that was, especially the way Gene's guts were churning, and wouldn't that just be insult to injury, excuse himself from Captain Winters to go and loose his bowels over some rotting log. He shifted a little on the hard ground, right to left, away from Winters and then, inexplicably, back towards him. Mercifully, his stomach settled. Their ODs scratched together like sandpaper and Gene couldn't help but think how much they'd all reek if it weren't so frigid. The thought of a man like Winters smelling bad embarrassed Gene profoundly. 

"Are you all right?" 

Gene held himself taut a minute, then eased off, slumping leeward into Winters' side. He could feel himself thawing. Some of it was simple physics, sure, but sharing a foxhole with Heffron didn't make him feel this way, the safe sort of drowsy, not the kind that made you wonder if you were going to curl up in the snow and never open your eyes again. Spina heard about some poor sap in C Company they found stripped bare naked under a pile of brush, blanched and stiff and long past saving. As if Gene didn't have enough to worry about. 

"Doc," Winters said. 

"Dunno," Gene said quietly. 

Winters coughed way back in his throat, and Gene thought maybe that was how it worked, that maybe Winters' magic came right up out of him that way, simple as anything.

" _Traiteur_ ," he said hoarsely, because he was beginning to feel warmer than anyone had a right to be out here. 

"Don't think I've got anything on your grandma," Winters said, the cant of his words an apology. 

"How 'bout Welsh?" Gene asked. He ought to've been more formal, used his rank and all, but his thoughts were muddy. All his senses were. Abruptly he was cast back; he had the feel of Welsh's uniform under his fingers, could smell the sizzling, hissing campfire where it smoldered in the dell, snuffed out under frantic, booted feet. He smelled gunpowder. He tasted blood.

"You see him anywhere around here?" Winters sounded bitter, and that was jarring. "It was like Moose," he said, almost conspiratorially. "I couldn't—"

"I heard you," Gene said, shaking his head fiercely. "I heard you talking." Dumbly, dreamily, he let his head fall against Winters'. There was a voice in Gene's head said Winters oughtn't to be so close, but there was another voice telling the first to hush up. 

"Talking." Winters' lips were moving at Gene's temple. "Is that what I do, talk?" 

Gene nodded, his movements thick. "Yeah, you talk. Does something," he said. "Something good." Winters's words were lilting, cottony things, made to bolster Gene, to fit in every crack and gash, wrap him up like something precious. Beside him Gene felt Winters' shoulders shake, his laughter soft and incredulous, and it was only then Gene realized he'd spoken at least part of his sentimental ramble aloud. He ought to be embarrassed. He felt too loose, though; he felt too nice. 

"You can't break on me, Gene," Winters said quietly. He drew up a breath like filling a syringe, and then he pressed his mouth to Gene's jawbone. 

Somehow the gesture was entirely unsurprising, and now it was Gene's turn to laugh. Hysterics bubbled up from somewhere down deep inside. "That magic too?" 

Winters shook his head. "Just something I was thinking about." 

"I think it is," Gene said. "Magic." It surely was, he thought. He felt wild with it already, skin tingling like peppermint. 

"Oh?" 

"Think you oughta try it on the mouth, though," Gene burbled crazily. 

Winters gulped. "Gene—" 

"C'mon." 

Winters sighed, brought his hand up to palm Gene's cheek. Gene hadn't been touched by anyone in this whole damned forest who hadn't felt like to brand him with the cold, but Winters' fingers slid over his skin like sunbeams as he turned Gene's face to his and kissed him again on the lips, closemouthed and chaste. 

Oh, that was magic all right. Like a shot in the damn arm, and he wanted more of it. Gene grabbed at the front of Winters' coat and tugged him forward to kiss again. Winters made a noise, of pleasure or of surprise, and when he did he opened his mouth a little and Gene felt the wet slip of his tongue. 

When they broke apart Gene began to laugh. Winters stiffened next to him, like he thought he might've done wrong, made Gene break after all. Gene grabbed for Winters' hand and put his fingers up to his lips, kissed them, hoped Winters would feel that he was smiling. 

"That how you get Captain Nixon out of his foxhole in the mornings?" 

Treasonous, that question, and Winters stayed stiff a minute, probably thinking about whether or not to sock Gene for asking. But then he leaned heavily on Gene and laughed himself, real gladly, and that was magic too, cheered Gene up all over again to hear Winters sound that way, to know he had something good for himself.

"Lew makes do with coffee," Winters said. "Most of the time." 

They fell silent after that, and Gene kept hold of Winters' hand. It seemed they'd both got to thinking. Gene himself was turning something over in his brain, and the more he thought on it the more it threatened to spoil his fine mood.

"What's the point--" Gene said after a minute. 

"Eugene?" 

He shook his head. "Nevermind." 

He'd been about to say what was the point of anything Winters could do if it was just enough to make some dumb medic feel a little better in the cold, snap Blithe out of whatever idiopathic crossed-wire crackup he had back in France. If it couldn't sew up torn flesh or funnel blood back into veins. But maybe, Gene reasoned, the small magics native to a man weren't made with war in mind. Maybe God or Nature or whoever never did bother to dream up Bastogne. He couldn't say how his grandma would've fared. He couldn't say for certain what'd she'd have accomplished in the face of mortars. 

If His will don't match up with yours— 

But that didn't bear thinking about, and anyway he thought he might make Winters feel bad. So he shut up. Silence fell again. Brush of lips across his brow, fingers in his hair to follow, and then Winters eased himself to his feet. Cold air should've flooded back in in his wake, but Gene was still deliciously warm, warm as bathwater, warm as September back home. 

"Get some rest," Winters said, and then he stole back out of the foxhole just as suddenly as he'd come. 

And Gene did rest awhile, because Winters said to, and because the _chaleur_ in his foxhole now was a gift, plain and simple. But presently Gene got to thinking, mainly about the way Winters' laugh had sounded, his timbre as he spoke about Nixon. Gene thought about Winters' hands on Nixon's forehead, about his hands in Gene's own hair, and something snagged at his memory then, something about a hand and about Heffron. About Babe. 

Gene lay still a little longer. He popped his sore finger into his mouth prodded it with his tongue. Temporary, maybe, and small in the scheme of things. But it soothed the hurt, and Gene decided that was all right. He got up out of his foxhole and walked out to the line.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] King of Cups](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8549689) by [houxvertetbruyere](https://archiveofourown.org/users/houxvertetbruyere/pseuds/houxvertetbruyere)




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